Stacked Standards

I fumble with the button on my pants.

I have no reason for taking them off, other than I’m lonely and she asked.

I’ve never heard of a flawless transition from “Us” to “Me”

And tonight, I’m no exception to the rule.

I’m over trying to pretend

That I know what the fuck is going on in my life.

So instead, I take another hit

And try not to flinch when she bites.

She doesn’t know why she’s here either.

Like we both just showed up one day

On the corner of Maybe and Why Not.

Her hands find my waist and they climb

                        Inch

                                  By inch

                                                Up my spine.

She pulls me down on top of her,

And her lips meet mine.

They’re cold.

Unfamiliar.

My tongue searches for a place that I know

Somewhere I might have once called home

But I’ll never find it here.

I find her naked body still beneath the moonlight.

“What is it like?” she asks. “Sex with her?”

“Sex with the woman I loved?”

I want to tell her,

“It’s like when heaven meets the earth.

A constant ocean breeze on a day too hot to stand.

It’s… not like this.”

But I keep it to myself for fear that

she might take it as an invitation to fall.

“Complicated.” I offer instead.

Life is easier when it’s only physical.

Maybe I get calls to come over at two in the morning.

I wake up with more marks than a kid in catholic school,

And the chances of being surprised with an intellectual conversation are thin.

But she never expects to hear the words “I love you.”

And she will never ask me if I meant it when I said she was beautiful..

When I turn my head and bite my tongue

She will not take my face into the palm of her hands

And tell me that everything will be fine.

Instead, she will dig her nails into the soft of my back

And tell me to do that thing again with my tongue.

I oblige -

Because the bedroom is the first place I’ve found

Where I can live up to the standards

Stacked against me.